NOW Rejects Palin, The Whackogelical Darling Of The Republicans

Here’s a piece at Common Dreams from the Independent/UK on the National Organization For Women’s rejection of Sarah Palin and John McBush…Cain.

A little sample:

Another Wasilla resident, Phil Munger, a music composer and teacher, says she pushed an evangelical agenda in the town. “She wanted to get people who believed in creationism on the [school] board. I bumped into her after my band played at a graduation ceremony at the Assembly of God [a church]. I said, ‘Sarah, how can you believe in creationism – your father’s a science teacher.’ And she said, ‘We don’t have to agree on everything.’ I pushed her on the earth’s creation, whether it was really less than 7,000 years old and whether dinosaurs and humans walked the earth at the same time. And she said yes, she’d seen images somewhere of dinosaur fossils with human footprints in them.”

She might well have seen such a thing. They were fakes created by creationists, you know, Christians who will lie, cheat, steal, kill, deceive, do whatever is necessary to prove that their narrow, ugly little view of the world is the only right one.

And finally there’s this:

Mr Munger also asked Mrs Palin if she believed in the End of Days, the doomsday scenario when the Messiah will return. “She looked in my eyes and said, ‘Yes, I think I will see Jesus come back to earth in my lifetime’.”

Just when the United States and the world need American leaders grounded in reality, in facts, in evidence, in the real world, the Republicans offer us a delusional, whacked-out freak who lies, abuses political power, lies, believes falsehoods, lies, and thinks Armageddon is a real battle that is supposed to set the world right.

6 Responses

Palin’s creationist ideas really don’t matter, they’re not going to effect anyone, and if you look at some of the previous VPs in American history, she’s not the only Christian fundamentalist. The real problem is that she believes that the butchery of Muslims in Iraq is God’s work and America is God’s instrument. Although, McCain is worse, he’s a megalomaniac who wants to go to war with Iran, without even having any thought out reason.

I think they do matter, for more than one reason. In the first place they demonstrate that she doesn’t operate mentally in the real world, accepting unfounded myths as reality. That doesn’t speak well of her intelligence or her ability to make reasoned judgments about the real world, as your comment on the butchery of Muslims indicates.

And in the second place, given the pathetic inability of high percentages of Americans to think rationally and critically, and who favor the teaching of religious dogma in science classes, it’s not improbable that a McCain-Palin administration would be giving support to such efforts, further degrading an already degraded educational system. After all, twenty percent of Americans believe the sun revolves around the earth, according to long term studies by the National Science Foundation.

So, yeah, her ideas will affect a lot of people if she gains national political power.

Going by past President and Vice Presidents, holding odd religious beliefs and being of questionable intelligence is a prerequisite, so why just her? You can’t serious think that McCain or Bush are any more sane or intelligent. Come to that what about Obama, his views on Israel are far more dangerous than her views on creationism.

Congress and the Senate aren’t about to pass legislation banning the teaching of evolution in favour of creationism, so it’s extremist to say that her creationist views will have a major impact on education. If she changed her views on evolution tomorrow, she’d be just as dangerous.

I think Bush is a psychopath, and McCain is a pathetic, ethically-disgusting old man dressed in rigid ideology. As for Israel, I frankly don’t much care about Israel. I think Israel is a danger to the world and should be cut loose instead of coddled. But the bigger problem is here in the United States, in a political system gone dangerously awry in ways that are dangerous to the United States itself and to the world. That’s the context in which we need to look at Palin (and McCain and Obama).

In the past, whatever the predilections of Presidents and Vice-Presidents, the Constitutional system here worked well enough to restrain their excesses of belief and ideology. Not perfectly, mind you, but for the most part.

That Constitutional system has been so weakened and undermined by the Republicans/Conservatives in the last thirty years, give or take, that it can no longer be counted on to restrain people like Sarah Palin and John McCain.

No, it’s not just her belief in creationism that’s at issue. That’s a sample of an ignorant mind at work, and as I said, her beliefs and her attempts to push them on others through the abuse of her political office show that her judgment is seriously, dangerously flawed. In the political climate created by the Conservatives and the Bush nutcases, it is, as I said, not improbable that her religious views could impact education in this country negatively. It doesn’t require a law from Congress. It does require a right-wing judiciary, which we now have, despite bright spots of intelligence like the judge who decided the Dover case. It does require a citizenry who choose ignorance and whose ability to think critically is minimal. We have that. And it does require impassioned ignorance, which we have plenty of from the political right-wing and the religious fundogelicals.

Palin, alone, is not a problem, just another ignorant religious freak. Palin in power in the current political climate in the United States? That’s a problem, and her record in Alaska shows it. (See my post on Jeff Jacoby yesterday.)

Palin is a member of a bizarre religious cult, so where a good number of past Presidents and Vice Presidents. Her religious views are no more extreme than Bush, Cheney, Carter or Regan, and in terms of threats to global security, probably no more extreme than Obama’s.

I detest Palin on many levels but I think that a lot of the attacks on her are sexist and hypocritical. It’s also extremist to say that she’s a threat to the national education system, when that obviously isn’t true, the reality is she won’t have the power to ban the teaching of the theory of evolution – you don’t even have a national curriculum. So its about as relevant, as saying she is a moody cow once a month.

A lot of your country men and women, including Palin, are incredibly bloody stupid, but stupidity isn’t the problem, Obama’s not stupid but if he means what he said about Jerusalem, then he’s more dangerous than Bush, because Palestine is at the heart of America’s Middle Eastern foreign policy, at the heart of the wars your country has inflicted on the world, which are the pretext for the erosion of civil liberties in your country.